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The Rise and Fall of Ski Ballethttps://grantland.com/2015/03/19/we-were-real-fing-athletes-the-rise-and-fall-of-ski-ballet-winter-olympics/
https://grantland.com/2015/03/19/we-were-real-fing-athletes-the-rise-and-fall-of-ski-ballet-winter-olympics/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 19:36:46 +0000http://grantland.com/?post_type=grantland_sports&p=240009]]>It started with a dinner party. A few glasses of wine and a friend of a friend up on her feet on the far side of the table, striking poses, waving her arms, showing us her old moves. She’d competed on the freestyle skiing World Cup circuit in the 1990s, she explained. The discipline she’d competed in — a weird hybrid of figure skating and gymnastics, but on skis — didn’t exist anymore. No one at our dinner table full of winter sports enthusiasts had even heard of it. It was called ski ballet.

I went home that night and fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of grainy footage from the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s: tasseled costumes, synthesized music, triumphant spandexed West Germans. In formal competitions, athletes skied down a smooth, gentle slope, combining jumps and flips and spins with complex edge work and sweeping choreography. The skiers were judged, as in figure skating, on a combination of technical and artistic considerations.

The videos I found were equal parts amusing and impressive. But they didn’t tell me where ski ballet had come from, or where it had gone. How does an entire sport just disappear?

♦♦♦

It started — no, really — with the Vietnam War. After the draft and the protests and the flag-draped coffins, “the youth of America was starting to question the established rules and regulations,” ski ballet pioneer Bob Howard told me. So freestyle skiing was that, in fact, personified.”

Young people in North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s “rejected the strictures associated with alpine racing and constipated European ski technique, innovating with mogul skiing, aerial maneuvers, and ski ballet,” longtime ski writer Leslie Anthony concurred in his 2010 book, White Planet: A Mad Dash Through Modern Global Ski Culture.

Today, any fan of the Winter Olympics is familiar with mogul skiing — where athletes clamp their knees together and bounce down a bump-filled course like human pogo sticks — and aerials, which features skiers flying through the air like gymnasts off a vault, completing twists or flips or other contortions in midair before landing on their skis. But the three subdisciplines began as one. In the earliest days, freestyle skiers — back then they were also called hotdog skiers, or stunt skiers, or sometimes acrobatic skiers — would combine the bumps and jumps of moguls, the big air of aerials, and the tricks and intricate maneuvers of ballet skiing into a single, madcap run down the mountain. They were crazy kids doing tricks on snow.

“At that time it was a start and finish gate, from the top of True Grit[footnote]True Grit is a classic double black diamond run at Waterville Valley, the New Hampshire hill where some of the earliest freestyle competitions were held. Wayne Wong recalls hitchhiking to Waterville for the first organized freestyle skiing competition, in March 1971. He came in third.[/footnote] to the bottom,” says Wayne Wong, the sport’s first world champion and the inventor of a host of never-before-seen-on-snow tricks. “What you did in between was up to the individual skier.”[footnote]In the early days, ballet skiing took place on regular downhill ski runs — sometimes with jumps and moguls built into the course. As time went on, ballet shifted to a smoother, gentler slope — by its later years, skiers appeared to be traveling down a course with less grade than a bunny hill.[/footnote]

“To me, the sport was all three events,” said Genia Fuller, who won three overall freestyle world titles in the 1970s. Even as the nascent sport divided itself into subdisciplines, with separate prizes for each, many athletes still competed in all three.

Freestyle skiing in its early days, Anthony told me, was “really on the ragged edge.” This trailer for a documentary about the 1974 pro tour shows the beautiful chaos of the early scene:

♦♦♦

It began where other sports finish. “Freestyle skiing worked backward,” Jeff Chumas says. “We started out as a professional sport and then turned into an amateur sport to allow it to become Olympic-eligible.” Chumas competed as an aerialist from 1976 to 1980 and became the director of the United States freestyle ski program from 1985 to 1995.

So while the earliest days spawned a series of pro tours, by the late 1970s the athletes were considering whether to go amateur. “I remember sitting down in a meeting, I believe it was Oberjoch, Germany, in 1978 or 1979,” Chumas said. “There was a vote taken by the membership of those of us who were competing in either moguls, aerials, ballet, or all three, over whether we supported the concept of freestyle skiing becoming an Olympic sport. That was an affirmative vote.”

The question of status — amateur or professional — wasn’t the only one ski ballet was wrestling with. In the late 1970s, the fundamental nature of the sport was up for grabs.

“Suzy Chaffee had this great idea, let’s throw some music into this,” Howard told me. Chaffee, who became one of the highest-profile stars of the sport, had a figure skating and dance background, he said.[footnote]I was unable to reach Chaffee for this story. Before shifting to ski ballet, she had nine top-10 finishes on the FIS World Cup circuit as a downhill skier.[/footnote] “So she interpreted it in a dance way. I, on the other hand, was more interested in putting on some rock ’n’ roll in the background and just let it happen.”

Through the ’70s, Howard worked on tricks like the pole flip, where a ballet skier would plant his poles in the ground ahead of him and then launch into the air, flipping over — sometimes with an added twist or two — before landing on his skis. Meanwhile, athletes like Fuller were innovating in other directions: Fuller had been doing routines without poles at all, landing axels — the same jump that figure skaters do, completing one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half, or three-and-a-half rotations — using only the edges of her skis to propel her into the air.

Wong had already bowed out. The streamlining of the three subdisciplines, the increasing organization, ski ballet’s drift toward choreography, and the figure skating model — “that was the natural progression,” he says, but none of it was what he’d signed up for. He’d been drawn to “the freeness of the raw sport,” he told me, and to the idea of pushing the limits of what could be done on skis.

In 1980, ski ballet had its debut FIS World Cup season. Howard swept the year, winning all five contests. The next year, he won eight of the nine events. On the women’s side, Jan Bucher, another founding giant of the sport, also swept her five events. She would go on to win a staggering 59 World Cup ski ballet events over the next decade.[footnote]For comparison, megastar Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn just notched her 65th World Cup victory. Vonn has racked up her wins across five racing events — downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom, and super combined— while all of Bucher’s victories came in one category.[/footnote]

As the sport established itself on the international World Cup circuit, it also rippled outward into popular culture. Ski ballet played a role in Hot Dog,[footnote] In this scene, a plucky American duels a sinister Austrian for ski ballet glory.[/footnote] a 1984 comedy set in the world of competitive freestyle skiing (the New York Timescalled it “less moronic than it might have been”), and ballet skiers made appearances in everything from Chapstick commercials to Bond movies.

In 1986, skier turned filmmaker and fashion designer Willy Bogner released Fire and Ice, starring Chaffee and another early star of the sport, John Eaves, as a romantic skiing duo. Let’s go ahead and call this peak ski ballet:

♦♦♦

It started with a goal. Ballet skiers had one main reason for giving up their pro tour and going amateur: to make it to the Olympics. For the 1988 Winter Games, in Calgary, Alberta, all three freestyle disciplines — moguls, aerials, and ballet — were admitted as demonstration sports.

But trouble was already brewing. “In those early days of it being an Olympic-eligible sport, freestyle skiing was fighting a very significant battle,” Chumas said. “In the United States, and under the direction of the United States ski team, we were fighting for precious few resources against very well established sports like Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, and the like. Freestyle skiing was not clearly understood back in those days.”

Ski ballet, as Chumas recalls it, did not win over fans in Calgary. “Its debut as a demonstration sport in 1988 did not do ballet skiing any favors,” he told me. “It was not received well, and I would venture to say that from that moment on, it was probably doomed.

“It didn’t do well with TV ratings, it didn’t do well with respect to how it was viewed and reviewed. Which is not to say that there wasn’t some great ballet skiing that happened.”

West Germany’s Hermann Reitberger took the top spot in Calgary. Reitberger, with a mane of curls worthy of a glam metal band and a bedazzled, flowing black outfit capped by white gloves, was a technician: Linking trick after trick with grandiose choreography, he didn’t put an edge wrong. His sleek, stylized winning performance epitomized how far ski ballet had evolved from its wild roots:

At the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, moguls became a full medal sport while aerials and ballet remained in the demonstration category. Then, in 1994 in Lillehammer, aerials advanced to medal status and ballet was dropped entirely. Meanwhile, snowboarding — which was at least as much an outgrowth of skateboard culture as it was from skiing — was exploding. In 1997, the first Winter X Games was held, and in 1998 snowboarding made its Olympic debut. Increasingly, skiing and snowboarding were being drawn under the ever-broadening umbrella of extreme sports. The future, it seemed, was Tony Hawk on snow, not Nancy Kerrigan on skis. To the extent that there had ever been room for choreography and costumes within ski culture, that window was closing.

For Chumas, it came down to money and numbers. “One of the problems that freestyle skiing had, and probably still has, is for some reason, after its heyday as a professional sport in the early-to-mid-’70s, it just never generated membership,” he said. “It never generated the numbers of participants that would merit strong sponsorships and a large amount of national and international interest.

“Ballet was really more of a performance art. So yeah, I think there were some cultural issues. But again, it did not generate membership,” he said. He estimates that during his tenure as director of freestyle skiing, the number of registered ballet skiers throughout the country was in the hundreds. (Aerials and moguls, for their part, were only in the low thousands.)

“Let’s compare it for a moment to snowboarding,” Chumas said. “One of the reasons why snowboarding became very successful as an Olympic sport is because of the vast numbers of people that it brings to the mountain.”

Justin Holland skied the World Cup circuit during ski ballet’s final years, from 1995 to 1999. His frustration with the loss of his sport was still palpable when I called him to talk about his career. Holland has heard various theories about the IOC’s refusal to admit ski ballet to the Olympics — lack of sponsorship, poor marketing, a reluctance to admit another judged sport after all the trouble figure skating has caused over the years.

He recalls the authorities adding more and more rules and required elements to ski ballet in an effort to satisfy the need for objectivity in determining a winner. “They were obsessed with trying to fit the square peg into the round hole,” he said. “Olympic events had to be measured on some sort of ruler.

“So the sport just became more and more prescribed, and as a result, formulaic, and that wasn’t what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a lot more free-form. So right when the sport was supposed to be breaking out and becoming an Olympic event, we basically strangled it in its crib. And then it was only a matter of time.”

After trying and failing to get the sport readmitted for the 1998 Games in Nagano and the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Holland and his colleagues were told in 1999 that the 2000 FIS World Cup season would be ski ballet’s last. Some of them hung on for one more year. Holland retired, figuring that carrying on to the bitter end would be too depressing.

These days, aside from an occasional old-timer dusting off his old gear,[footnote]Ski ballet in its later form required specialized skis, boots, bindings, and poles that could withstand the skier’s full weight. Most of the equipment isn’t even made anymore.[/footnote] ski ballet has vanished from the mountains. “I was a three-time world champion,” Howard told me. “In a sport that no longer exists.”

Here’s a performance from one of ski ballet’s final FIS events, in 1999:

♦♦♦

As snowboarding stormed the slopes in the late ’90s and ballet skiers fought a slow, losing battle to keep their funding and status, another skiing revolution was brewing. In February 1998, Salomon released the Teneighty, a ski that had an upturned tip on both ends, like a snowboard. For the first time, Anthony wrote in White Planet, skiers could “ride up and out of halfpipes, rotate, then re-enter backward and slide down without digging their tails in.” The twin-tip innovation brought skiers to the terrain park. It allowed the flowering of ski slopestyle and halfpipe, both of which became Olympic events in 2014, alongside their snowboarding counterparts.

The “New School,” or freeskiing, as it’s known,[footnote]There’s an esoteric debate to be had about whether “freeskiing” technically falls under the umbrella of “freestyle skiing.” According to the FIS and the Olympics, it does.[/footnote] has the technical seeds of ski ballet — and the early, rule-breaking ethos of freestyle skiing more generally — still within it. “[The Teneighty’s creators] were really just trying to get a ski that you could play in pipes and parks with,” Anthony said. “But that territory had been traversed early on by ballet skiers.”

Steve Hambling, who competed as a ballet skier for Canada in the 1970s, is now the director of a freestyle skiing program at the resort where he learned to ski. He’s happy to see the sport live on through the New School, and he told me he still busts out his old ballet gear from time to time to demonstrate the sport for his athletes.

“For sure, nowadays the kids do chuckle when they see it — because it is humorous, right?” He told me. “You’re going, ‘What the fuck? These guys did this shit?’ But then that day, or the next day, they’re trying to imitate it. And yeah, they’ll laugh at it — we all had pouffy hair, and the one-piece suits and all that shit, right?

“Listen, when we were doing it, and people were watching back then, nobody laughed. People were like, ‘Holy Christ, these guys are amazing.’”

Genia Fuller still remembers the disappointment of hearing that the sport she helped invent was vanishing from the world. “I was very bummed,” she told me. But mostly she lingers on the good memories of those years.

]]>https://grantland.com/2015/03/19/we-were-real-fing-athletes-the-rise-and-fall-of-ski-ballet-winter-olympics/feed/0Christian-RijavecrafeboogsPhineas Gage, Gauging Timehttps://delistraty.com/2015/03/16/phineas-gage-gauging-time/
https://delistraty.com/2015/03/16/phineas-gage-gauging-time/#commentsMon, 16 Mar 2015 15:37:33 +0000http://delistraty.com/?p=9419]]>Why do people feel the hours pass more slowly or quickly than they really do? The famous story of a man who lived after an iron flew through his skull holds clues.

On Wednesday, September 13, 1848, 25-year-old Phineas Gage was helping lay a railroad track through Cavendish, Vermont, for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad Company. It was 4:30 pm, and the sun was still out as he used a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a long ditch. Without warning, the powder exploded and the iron—roughly 3.5 feet long, an inch wide, and 13 pounds in weight—flew from his hand and through his left cheek. It tore through his brain and the back of his skull, landing more than 80 feet away “smeared with blood and brains,” as his biographer Malcolm Macmillan would later write. Gage was immediately blinded in his left eye and fell to the ground. But he didn’t die. He convulsed on the ground then he got up, boarded an oxcart, and rode into town, less than a mile away.

The doctor Edward H. Williams received him in town. “I first noticed the wound upon the head before I alighted from my carriage, the pulsations of the brain being very distinct,” Williams wrote of meeting Gage. With a burned face, burned arms, and bits of his brain visible through his skull, Gage said, “Doctor, here is business enough for you.”

Williams invited Gage into a room in the hotel in Cavendish, where he examined the wound. Soon after, John Martyn Harlow attended to him as well. “Mr. Gage persisted in saying that the bar went through his head,” Williams wrote. “I did not believe Mr. Gage’s statement at that time.” Gage stood up and vomited. As he vomited, “about half a teacupful of the brain” fell on the floor.

Williams removed bits of dirt that had gotten in Gage’s brain. He partially closed the wound so that it could still drain and applied a wet compress before bandaging his head. Gage spent the night alone. He told Williams, he did “not care to see his friends, as he shall be at work in a few days.”

Gage was too optimistic about his prognosis, but even though he wasn’t back to work in a few days, he was able to walk around within about two months. It was at this time that his friends started noticing a difference in his behavior.

He was “no longer Gage,” according to Harlow. His employers had once called him “a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation.” Now he could not keep a schedule. Once a quiet, respectful man, he now engaged in “the grossest profanity,” and he showed “little deference for his fellows.”

Years later, his family and friends also began to notice his confusion with time, according to Macmillan’s account. He claimed that minutes would drag or speed up without warning. “Given what we know about frontal-lobe injuries,” says John Darrell Van Horn, an associate professor of neuroimaging and informatics at the University of Southern California, it follows that Gage could have “had problems with perseveration and with time distortion.”

Gage wanted to return to work for the railroad company but they didn’t want him back, deeming him mentally unfit. For a few months he took a job at Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan, where he stood in a corner and held a tamping iron for museumgoers to ogle. He soon grew tired of the freak show and found a job in New Hampshire where he worked as a horse groom and carriage driver at the Hanover Inn. He was fired for “mental unsuitability” and took a similar job in Chile.

In January 1860, he moved to Santa Clara, California, so he could be near his mother. A month later he started having the most serious epileptic seizures he had experienced since the accident. At 5 a.m. on May 20, 1860, Gage fell into a series of long seizures, losing control of his body for minutes at a time. The seizures continued throughout the day and the night. The next morning, at age 36, 11 and a half years after the accident, the flying iron finally killed him.

* * *

In 2012, more than 150 years later, Van Horn looked at a digital model of Gage’s skull on his computer. Van Horn had long been interested in Gage, a man whose condition has piqued the curiosity of many in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. But besides a few diaries and two official medical reports, relatively little is known of Gage.

One of the most useful pieces of evidence in his case was a series of computerized tomography (CT) scans taken in the early 1990s. “These were the last known, best-quality images of Gage’s skull,” Van Horn told me. No autopsy was performed on Gage after his death, but due to Harlow’s persistence in 1866, five years after he died, Gage’s body was exhumed and his skull removed. Gage’s skull has been housed at the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard University for the past century, and Harvard’s archivists unearthed the CT scans for Van Horn.

Using the CT scans and Harlow’s reports, Van Horn and his team set out to digitally recreate Gage’s skull. If they could create a digital replica of Gage’s skull and the lesion in his brain, they could model the flight of the tamping iron and see exactly which part of his brain it had penetrated.

After modeling more than 1 million different possible entry-points for the tamping iron and all of the specific injuries that each entry point would imply, Van Horn’s mathematical model showed him exactly where the tamping iron penetrated Gage’s brain. He saw that Harlow’s initial autopsy was essentially correct: The iron had mostly affected Gage’s frontal lobe. What Harlow did not know—and what Van Horn discovered—is that it was specifically the left frontal lobe and the orbitofrontal cortex that were damaged by the iron. The orbitofrontal cortex is most associated with socially inappropriate behavior, emotional changes, and a loss of inhibition, all of which were symptoms reported repeatedly by Gage’s friends and family. “Gage clearly had behavioral changes due to brain injury,” Van Horn says.

150 years after Gage’s death, Van Horn became the first to provide an extensive neurological explanation for the reported behavioral changes in perhaps the most famous neurological patient in history. What Van Horn could not find, however, was an explanation for Gage’s peculiar perception of time.

* * *

About a decade earlier, on a spring morning in 2003, Heather Berlin left her dorm room beneath the spires of Magdalen College in Oxford, England, where she was a doctoral student, and made her way to her office in the department of experimental psychology up the road.

At the New School in New York, where Berlin completed her master’s degree, she conducted a study of time perception by having participants read index cards with random numbers printed on them, then asking the participants how long they thought the task had lasted. Reading the numbers out loud kept participants from counting to keep track of time.

“I literally just flipped these cards and had them read these random numbers,” Berlin told me. “I would sit there with my stopwatch and was timing it and it was all very manual.” At Oxford she asked a fellow doctoral student skilled in computer programming to digitalize her research method, allowing her to carry the test around on her tablet computer.

With her iPad in tow, Berlin spoke to healthy people and people with orbitofrontal cortex lesions in Oxford and London and subjected them all to her digitized time-perception test. Berlin asked participants to tell her when they believed 90 seconds had passed as she distracted them with the randomized numbers. Participants with undamaged brains tended to let a few more than 90 seconds pass before stopping her, indicating a slightly slower perception of time. Participants with orbitofrontal cortex damage, however, would stop her at almost exactly 90 seconds, indicating a more accurate perception of time.

But being accurate isn’t necessarily a good thing. An accurate perception of time can be evolutionarily disadvantageous. One reason why people with healthy brains might perceive time as slightly slower than it actually is (and therefore wait until 95 or 100 seconds have passed before saying 90 seconds have passed) may come down to a neurotransmitter called neuropeptide-Y (NPY).

Charles A. Morgan at the Yale School of Medicine conducted a study four years before Berlin’s findings, where he tested the amount of NPY present in the brains of U.S. Army soldiers. He assessed soldiers prior to training to establish a “control” group, then tested soldiers after a high-pressure, 24-hour survival training, or after what he termed a “P.O.W. experience,” in which soldiers were interrogated, for training, in a tense, realistic prisoner of war situation. This gave him “stressed” group to work with.

When people with normal brains are stressed, adrenaline is released. The brain is readying the person to attack or to run, according to David Eagleman’s research at Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Perception and Action. If the situation is sufficiently stressful, then the responses of alarm and fear could become so intense that, without the counteracting release of NPY, they would debilitate the prefrontal cortex, which affects rationality and decision-making, according to Morgan. Fortunately, the release of NPY helps to regulate stress, Morgan says. He found that soldiers who had just undergone survival training or the mock interrogation—the “stressful” group—had significantly greater levels of NPY compared to his control group of soldiers who had not been submitted to these situations. He added that it is not military training that produces these NPY differences but that anyone put in a stressful situation would show higher levels of NPY. Without NPY it would be extremely difficult for people to maintain cognitive skills, motor skills, and decision-making abilities when faced with danger.

As Berlin’s experiment showed, people with healthy brains experience time slightly slower than it is actually is not just in dangerous situations but in normal situations as well. The potential reason for this, according to Morgan’s research, is that NPY is always being released, just at lower levels during safe situations. So for healthy people, time always seems a little slow, with the potential to slow down even more in the face of danger. This function of stress regulation in the brains of healthy people means that they are able to remain calmer and act more reasonably, in danger and the rest of the time, Morgan says.

People with orbitofrontal cortex damage, however, have a more accurate (which, relative to healthy people, is a faster) perception of time. Berlin told me that this tends to make people with orbitofrontal cortex damage “feel pressured to react more quickly when it might be more adaptive to take a bit more time and be more methodical.”

Berlin demonstrated this conclusion by conducting a test similar to the famous marshmallow experiment (using £80 as the reward rather than a marshmallow) and found that people with orbitofrontal cortex damage tend to be more impulsive than healthy people because they don’t think they have as much time to make a decision. NPY is less effective on them, due to the brain damage.

People with orbitofrontal cortex “respond rapidly to rewards and [punishments] without assessing the consequences sufficiently,” Berlin writes.

So one’s perception of time seems to affect one’s ability to stay calm, to assess a situation, and to make good decisions. As time slows down, these abilities are strengthened. Van Horn found that Gage’s orbitofrontal cortex was severely damaged and Berlin and Morgan’s findings show that this might very well lead to greater stress and a faster perception of time. But does time perception come down to this alone or could there be another explanation as well? Could the answer be found not in neurology, but in psychology?

* * *

In 2009, Aaron Sackett from the University of Chicago gave 37 American undergraduate students a selection of text and asked them to underline each word that had a double-letter combination (for example: “This is an epigrammaticriddle.”) Sackett’s research assistant, Rachel Auer, told the participants that the test would last 10 minutes, then made a show of starting her stopwatch and walking out of the room.

The skull of Phineas Gage next to the tamping iron that pierced it (Jedimentat44/Wikimedia Commons)

In the first version of the experiment, Auer walked back into the room after only five minutes with a different, pre-set stopwatch that said 10 minutes had passed. In the second version of the experiment, she waited 20 minutes to re-enter the room, again claiming that 10 minutes had passed. In both experiments, the students rated how fun, engaging, enjoyable, and challenging they found the underlining task.

In a follow-up, two sets of students completed the underlining task over a 10-minute time period. Auer told the first set of students it had lasted five minutes. She told the second set it had lasted 20 minutes. In both the real and the fake “time speed up” scenario, students felt that time had passed faster than it actually had. The students who reported that time flew also reported enjoying the task significantly more. They felt challenged, and seemed to derive pleasure from an otherwise boring task.

Sackett therefore concluded in his paper and in our conversations that simply being told that time is moving quickly might affect the brain’s perception of time as well.

“If you set the expectation [of a certain amount of time having passed] and then their experience doesn’t fulfill that expectation, it’s quite possible that they would engage in this process of misperceiving time,” Sackett says.

It is therefore possible that Gage’s distorted perception of time—that anyone’s distorted perception of time—is as simple as expecting time to pass in a certain way and then finding that it did not. “It certainly fits with the theoretical side of things,” Sackett says.

In another of Sackett’s experiments, he had students watch a movie in a dark room. He set up the start times so the movie would start and end at three different times, each with its own shift in light. “We set up the show times so that the movie either (a) started and ended before dark, (b) started before dark and ended after dark, or (c) started and ended after dark.” He found that the students who started finished watching the movie while it was still light out reported the strongest time distortion. “You can almost imagine them standing there, blinking in the bright sun, and feeling like the past 90 minutes had been compressed into just a short moment.”

Expectation of time, Sackett says, is time perception.

* * *

While working in Chile in the last years of his life, Gage was reported to have made a recovery. Fired from his previous job for rudeness and tardiness, he now seemed a reformed man as a carriage driver and horse groom in Chile. His perception of time seemed to recover—he told friends he felt “temporally adjusted,” according to Macmillan.

Macmillan, his biographer and a psychologist, wrote that Gage’s alleged recovery from a distorted perception of time implies that “damaged [neurological] tracts may re-establish their original connections or build alternative pathways as the brain recovers.”

Van Horn agrees. Changes in time perception may only be temporary, depending on the circumstance.

The tricky thing about Gage is that his case, although groundbreaking and fascinating, is not well-recorded. “Most commentators still rely on hearsay and accept what others have said about Gage, namely, that after the accident he became a psychopath,” MacMillan wrote. Certainly it’s impossible to know whether Gage really became a psychopath, but the literature that does exist—two medical analyses and various journals of Gage’s friends, family, and coworkers—points to a clear behavioral and time perception shift after the injury. It appears, though, that Gage’s perception of time was not altered until about one decade after the accident when he was in Chile, around 1858, according to Harlow’s postmortem analysis of Gage’s case.

All of the benefits of normal time perception (time “slowing” so people can make more reasoned decisions; time “speeding” when they are taking care of tasks that don’t need their full attention) are still evolutionarily advantageous to a person with orbitofrontal cortex injury—they just don’t come as naturally anymore. Still, there’s great evolutionary incentive to perceive time flexibly, speeding or slowing based on the situation at hand. So evolutionarily advantageous that even a damaged brain may adapt, according to Van Horn.

“The brain is very plastic,” he says. “Nothing else could explain how [Gage] survived for as long as he did.”

When Andria first asked me to review Artis Henderson’s debut memoir, Unremarried Widow, I was hesitant.

I’d been wanting to read the book for some time, but the cliché is true: that knock on my front door really is my worst nightmare. There’s a dark corner of my mind where that nightmare lives, a place I try my best to avoid, and I knew that to read Henderson’s grief would be to go to that place and stay there for a while. And parts of Henderson’s book were painful to read – I wept when the casualty officers informed her, in standard cold military language, of her husband’s death; when she discovered a video of him among his things that he’d intended to send her before he died; when she took off her wedding ring for the first time. But, mostly, I felt awe that she’d managed to take her grief and create, with such candor and care, a powerful memoir from it. Even more surprising, I found comfort in Henderson’s story, an unexpected friend.

author Artis Henderson

Nine months before Artis Henderson’s husband, Miles, leaves for his first deployment to Iraq in 2005, he dreams of his own death. In his dream, he and his co-pilot – the man he does ultimately crash with – float above the helicopter while it burns to the ground. “I took it as a warning, an admonition to care for Miles well,” Henderson writes in the preface. “If I loved him enough, I reasoned, he would come home.”

This haunting preface casts a pall over the rest of a book, a feeling of foreboding that permeates, as Henderson says, even the “sweetest days.” And there are many sweet days, from the first afternoons of their courtship in Florida to the nights they spend in a ramshackle house outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, holding hands as they go to sleep each night. All stories of loss are, at heart, love stories, and Henderson brings this one to life with an exquisite attention to detail, a poet’s memory for smell and sensation. “I stepped closer to Miles to breathe in his sun-warmed smell, like hay in summer,” she writes of an afternoon they spend together in limestone caverns early on in their relationship. “Even in the cold and damp he radiated heat. I still had to catch my breath with him sometimes, the way he made me feel.” These are the kinds of sensory details that love’s beginnings imprint on us, and she seems to have stored them away in perfect, untouched condition.

Henderson is just 26 and four months into marriage when she becomes a widow. It’s not a fate she would have ever seen coming – Army wifehood or widowhood. When she meets Miles, she is a liberal, vehemently against the war, with spiritual leanings that are more “New Age light than biblical.” Miles is a conservative Christian from Texas who felt a call to duty when the wars started. But Henderson is attracted to his fundamental goodness that “emanates from him like heat,” and their love – which seems to often be unspoken, communicated through unseen currents that pass between them – feels right to Henderson from the beginning.

But their story has its tensions and struggles. When Miles shows her the Apache gunship he’s training to fly in Iraq, she finds herself unsettled, struggling to make sense of how this man – “a man who almost never curses, who went to church every Sunday, who pressed his nose to the back of [her] neck as [they] slept – would kill other men.” It’s an unanswerable question, one I’ve circled around myself when thinking about my own husband, an Army Ranger (who curses like a sailor and does not go to church, but who has taught me more about love, kindness, and self-sacrifice than anyone I know). How to reconcile the dual impulses and identities in the men we love?

Henderson avoids spending much time on the question, though – perhaps because she senses its magnitude, or perhaps for the reason most military wives don’t dwell on it for very long: It doesn’t live in the realm of our day-to-day lives. Instead, Henderson continually revisits a more mundane question: how will she navigate this Army life without losing herself, her dreams, her ambitions? It’s at the heart of her everyday as a new military wife, a question deeply familiar to me that I haven’t stopped asking.

What if you love someone with your whole heart but you’re afraid that being with him means giving up the life you imagined for yourself?, Henderson writes on a folded up piece of paper during an icebreaker game with a few women she’s getting to know. She asks this question – of herself, of her mother, of her friends – continually, and yet it seems to me that she knows the answer from the beginning. After moving with Miles to dusty, hot Fort Hood, Texas, she finds herself isolated and bored, her days and sense of self slipping away. She calls her mother to ask her whether she should leave. Her mother lost her own love of her life, Henderson’s father, when a small plane he was piloting crashed with 5-year-old Henderson aboard. She never remarried. Do you love him? she asks Henderson.

“I love him more than anything,” I said.
Perhaps my mother considered her own life then. The Mountains of north Georgia, the red earth and the daffodils in spring, my father on his tractor at the house.
“Then you stay,” she said.

And she does. But it’s a life she almost refuses to allow herself to settle into completely. When Miles leaves for deployment, she decides not to stay at Fort Bragg where they’re stationed but to go back home to her mother’s in Florida instead. She loathes the idea of getting ensnared in FRG (Family Readiness Group) drama. “It never occurred to me these women might be a source of support while Miles was gone, that they might comfort me if the worst happened,” she writes. This part of the book – her struggles with tedium and isolation – may be the least memorable for the average reader, but, as an Army wife who chose to leave a career in New York for a sometimes lonely life in Georgia, I drank up the words with thirst. I felt as though she were a friend reaching out an orienting hand in a world that often seems impossible to navigate without getting lost.

Henderson tells her story mostly through meticulously rendered vignettes, finely drawn moments that make up her life with, and – and then, devastatingly, without – Miles. This approach can give the book a fragmented quality at times, but it also gives the memoir its vitality, a feeling not of rawness – it is too well-crafted for that – but of trueness. Reading Unremarried Widow, I sometimes felt as though I was being given access not to a narrative, molded and processed, but to Henderson’s memories: the memory of the taste of salt on Miles’s lips; of the evening she eats greasy barbecue to fill a profound hunger; of the night she sleeps with a man for the first time after Miles’s death, and realizes that kissing this new, strange mouth is what it feels like to betray someone you love. She gives it to us straight and fresh, an approach that is particularly powerful throughout the middle portion of the book: the notification of Miles’s death, and the dense forest of grief she makes her way through in its aftermath. There is a beautifully sculpted fragility to this whole section, hard to the touch but delicate, like a glass vase that could easily shatter if it were tipped off a ledge. And I suppose this is what grief does to us – both hardens us and makes us more fragile.

The vignettes in the book are punctuated by moments of plain-spoken truth Henderson knocks into, the hurt sudden and sharp. Perhaps the most heartbreaking line of the book comes towards the end when Henderson attends a conference for people who have lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of the “survivors,” as the conference dubs its attendees, wear badges with images of their loved ones on them. When one woman approaches her asking her whom she lost – a moment that initially shocks Henderson for its casualness – Henderson hands her the badge: “As I passed the photo to her I realized how young the man in the image was. It occurred to me that someday I will be an old woman carrying a photo of the boy I love.”

The clearing in Henderson’s tangled forest of grief arrives via a bin of Miles’s things from Iraq. Among his uniforms and civilian clothes, she finds a beautiful “if you’re reading this” letter. The whole book turns on this letter, in a way: A year after Miles’s death, she returns to its closing words – which encourage her to live her life with decency, dreams, and ambition — as she tries to figure out what’s next for her. This section — in which she tries to forge a life after her grief — feels in some ways like the least-complete in the book, but this is in part due to the fact that it’s a period of fumbling that she’s still making her way through as she writes the memoir. It’s inspiring to see her move forward. It’s also powerful to see how she comes to understand her mother in a new way: Miles’s death gives her access to a woman who loved her husband deeply but almost never speaks of him.

The most powerful aspect of this last section, though – the part that gives me the feeling that Henderson has not just survived something, but has become someone different in the process – is the bond she discovers with other military widows. At the conference she attends, she ends up meeting a group of wonderful young women, laughing with them as she hasn’t since Miles died. “Where had they been when I was trying to make a life alongside the military?” she writes. “The answer, of course, is that they had been there all along.” Henderson’s memoir – a message in a bottle on the shores of this sometimes isolating military life – has taught me quite the same lesson.

Filed under: Uncategorized]]>https://militaryspousebookreview.com/2015/03/19/then-you-stay-a-review-of-artis-hendersons-unremarried-widow/feed/12andria816widow3widow4widow5widowwidow2Simone-in-Oklahoma-300x224That\’s Why They\’re Called Privateshttps://gendermom.wordpress.com/2015/03/18/thats-why-theyre-called-privates/
https://gendermom.wordpress.com/2015/03/18/thats-why-theyre-called-privates/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 05:21:32 +0000http://gendermom.wordpress.com/?p=813]]>M.’s dad and I toured a new afterschool program this week. M.’s neighborhood pal, Poppy, goes there, and we thought it would simplify things if M. went, too.

We arrived a little early for the tour, and the director looked at her watch and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re early. Let’s sit down and talk.” Great! We could get our questions answered about the school before the other parents arrived.

We sat in tiny chairs at a tiny table. She crossed her hands and gave us a serious look. “So. M. is ‘trans,’ right? Is that the right word? ‘Trans?'”

Huh? I thought we were going to talk about their art program.

Sigh.

“Yes,” I said. “M. is transgender.”

When I called to schedule the tour, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the director’s step-son used to live two doors down from us, beyond the fact that his daughter used to play with mine and it would be fun for the girls to get reaquainted at her grandmother’s school.

“We want to be prepared,” she said. “We are a welcoming place. But we need to get the right training, get the education. I’m an educator.”

Good, this is good. She’s kind of freaked out, but she’s on our side – I think.

Then she tells us that she’s already told her entire staff. All of M.’s afterschool teachers already know that she’s transgender, before she’s set foot in the place. I think about how much she’d hate that, and wince. It hadn’t occured to me that they’d bring this up – or that they’d even remember that she was transgender. Or that they’d think it was such a big deal. I suppose that’s because things have been going so well, and most days we don’t even talk about this. It’s also because this isn’t swim class or ballet class or her regular school, where the issue might actually matter. It’s an afterschool program – a couple of hours at the end of the day, when she’ll be doing her homework, singing songs, reading books. How exactly do her genitals impact those activities, I wonder? I don’t ask the director this question, though it’s tempting.

I kept thinking about something our support group leader once said to us: “It’s remarkable how quickly common sense goes out the window when you mention the word ‘transgender.’ Suddenly people feel free to say and do things that they would never dream of saying or doing under other circumstances.” (Would you, say, reveal the private medical history of a child to your entire staff before asking the parents’ permission? Would you ask two gay or African-American parents how you should ‘educate your staff about this issue’ before their family could attend your school?) We’re in such early days on this issue that people have no idea how to approach it.

The thing is that I think this woman wants to support us. I think she wants to do the right thing. The problem is, in this case the right thing would have been to zip her lips and stop talking to her whole staff about what’s in my kid’s underpants. They really didn’t need to know about that. Or she could have at least checked with me before telling all of them.

But it’s done. And since competition is cut-throat in my town for reliable afterschool care, we’re pretty much stuck with this situation. So I’m trying to make the best of it, knowing that it could be a lot worse and also feeling grateful that I’m dealing with people who do have good intentions. The director even mentioned doing a staff training about gender identity in kids, and I told her I’d put her in touch with someone who could help with this. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful; I know I’m very lucky that she’s so open to learning about this and is trying to do right by my kid. It’s just that it’s hard sometimes to always be putting out fires, and to always be in the position of educating people about my child as if she’s some sort of exotic creature they’re afraid of handling wrong. She’s just a little kid.

I went home and wrote an email to the director, thanking her for being so supportive, sending her the name of someone who could train her staff, and then doing some damage control:

M. is very private about the fact that she is transgender, and has told us very clearly that she would like to be the one to decide whom she shares this information with. We try to respect this as much as possible, although of course certain adults (teachers, etc.) sometimes need to be told in order to be able to support her. Since M. really looks and behaves like any other little girl, and is discreet about using the bathroom and guarding her privacy, no one guesses that she’s transgender, which allows her to just fit in and be herself. At her school, we let her take the lead on which friends (if any) she chooses to tell. Other parents aren’t told unless M.’s dad and I decide that there is a compelling need for them to know. I think this plan would work well at your school, too. Should other children or their parents find out, and have questions, my standard answer is to acknowledge that yes, some people are transgender, and if necessary to explain what that means, but to also explain (both to the kids and the parents) that being transgender (or not) is a private medical issue, and “Discussing other people’s private parts isn’t something we do. That’s why they’re called privates.” :)

I haven’t heard back yet. Fingers crossed.

]]>https://gendermom.wordpress.com/2015/03/18/thats-why-theyre-called-privates/feed/39Private-PropertygendermomPrivate-PropertyA War Photographer Embeds Himself Inside a Video Gamehttps://time.com/3393418/a-war-photographer-embeds-himself-inside-a-video-game/
https://time.com/3393418/a-war-photographer-embeds-himself-inside-a-video-game/#commentsMon, 15 Sep 2014 19:09:43 +0000http://time.com/?p=3393418]]>The Last of Us Remastered is a post-apocalyptic video game released earlier this year on PlayStation 4 with an in-game Photo Mode, which freezes the game and lets players shoot, edit and share photographs of their achievements.

TIME assigned conflict photographer Ashley Gilbertson to use the Photo Mode to document the game’s protagonists as they fight to survive in a zombie-infested world. Gilbertson writes about his experience.

I’ve spent a few days inside the body of an angry Hugh Jackman-lookalike.

TIME asked me to work as a photographer within the video game called The Last of Us Remastered, a hyper violent game in which a player must kill people that are infected with some type of brain and flesh condition. The game, which is very carefully rendered to look as real as possible, gives the player access to a wide variety of weapons, but it also provides players with a camera to shoot their own action. I loved the concept – it brought to mind the ideas of photojournalism produced without a physical camera, best embodied in Mishka Henner’s brilliant series, No Man’s Land, a project that uses Google Street View to document Europe’s prostitution issues.

My approach with The Last of Us Remastered was to enter each situation, or level, and work the scene until I was confident I’d gotten the best photograph I could before moving on. It’s the same way I work in real life. Yet, I found it was more difficult to do in a virtual reality because I was expected to fight my way through these levels to get to the next situations. That involved chopping off people’s heads, shooting them point blank in the face or throwing bombs near them. If I failed, I’d have my neck bitten, with blood exploding from my jugular in some pseudo-sexual zombie move, forcing me to restart the level.

I initially played the game at home. But after a short time playing it, I noticed I was having very strong reactions in regards to my role as the protagonist: I hated it. When I covered real war, I did so with a camera, not a gun. At home, I’d play for 30 minutes before noticing I had knots in my stomach, that my vision blurred, and then eventually, that I had simply crashed out. I felt like this could well be my last assignment for TIME.

So, I moved to the TIME offices where Josh Raab, a contributing photo editor at Time.com and a former gamer, could take the controls and fight his way through the different stages for me. Josh developed a particular style of clearing levels – sneaking up on infected people, strangling them for a while and then stabbing them in the neck. I’d then retake the controls, letting me act more like a photographer. That’s when I started to make better images – the whole experience resembled an actual embed, with someone doing the fighting and me taking photographs.

In a day of combat in Iraq, I’d generally file between eight and 10 photographs per day. I figured I could do the same thing with this assignment. I was wrong. In combat, I need to be in position, prepared for a shot, and I’ve only got hundredths of a second to make it before the situation changes and I have to move on. There’s one moment, one frame. Within the game, I could freeze time. I had unlimited time to experiment and find my shot using different angles, depths of field, exposure, grain, vignettes and lenses. The zen approach to how I work in the field is lost within a gaming console. There, I had the opportunity to second-guess myself every time I hit pause.

An additional challenge was that I could make photographs that seemed almost “perfect”. It wasn’t hard to make images that recalled posters for a war film, or that might be used in an advertising campaign for the game itself. It was too clean. The last thing I wanted to do was to advertise the game, so I tried to mess with the photos a little. Put unimportant information in the foreground. Tilt the camera. Pull back too wide. I needed to make the shots imperfect because, I believe, imperfections make photography human. In advertising things look perfect. In journalism, there’s always something off. What some people see as visual weaknesses in our work, I see as part of our tableau.

“I found another [image] that reminded me of Michelangelo’s Pietà.”Ashley Gilbertson for TIME

I seek particular scenes when I work, and playing the game, I found myself doing the same thing. I’d gravitate towards darker situations, or spots with slivers of light, both environments I love to shoot on the field. I found one scene that reminded me of Paolo Pelegrin’s Lebanon image when I switched it to black-and-white. I found another (above) that reminded me of Michelangelo’s Pietà. I shot through a dirty window at one point (below) trying to emulate the refugee-in-bus-window-at-border-crossing image, but the subject, my virtual daughter, didn’t have the required expression of distress.

“I shot through a dirty window at one point trying to emulate the refugee-in-bus-window-at-border-crossing image, but the subject, my virtual daughter, didn’t have the required expression of distress.”Ashley Gilbertson for TIME

None of the game’s characters show distress, and that to me was bizarre – it’s a post apocalyptic scenario, with a few remaining humans fighting for the survival of their race! To be successful, a player must be the perpetrator of extreme, and highly graphic, violence. I’m interested in a more emotionally engaged type of photography, where the human reaction to a scene is what brings a story to life. That was tough inside this game. Occasionally the characters show anger, though generally they’re nonchalant about the situation they’ve found themselves in. In the end, their emotions mimicked that of the zombies they were killing.

By the time I finished this assignment, watching the carnage had became easier.

Yet, I left the experience with a sense that by familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing.

It’s the single largest issue I face as a photographer. How do we reach a readership that is accustomed to seeing people dying en masse in war zones as a result of games like this one? I’ve been trying to find alternative approaches to the topic for the past seven years, with limited success – the work I’m most proud of, Bedrooms of The Fallen, was just published as a book. It examines the intact bedrooms of soldiers killed overseas.

I came away from the experience having learnt a couple of things: that the work I usually do is an antidote to the type of entertainment this game represents and that I suck at video games.

]]>https://time.com/3393418/a-war-photographer-embeds-himself-inside-a-video-game/feed/0the-last-of-us-remastered-ashley-gilbertson-01ahinderaker"I found another [image] that reminded me of Michelangelo's Pietà.""I shot through a dirty window at one point trying to emulate the refugee-in-bus-window-at-border-crossing image, but the subject, my virtual daughter, didnÕt have the required expression of distress."Putting Off Tomorrowhttps://extradrymartini.com/2015/03/17/putting-off-tomorrow/
https://extradrymartini.com/2015/03/17/putting-off-tomorrow/#commentsTue, 17 Mar 2015 15:26:07 +0000http://extradrymartini.com/?p=958]]>“Procrastination is the thief of time.”

-Edward Young

Over and over and over again over these last two and a half years, I’ve reminded myself how precious time is; that it shouldn’t be wasted. After all, I’ve seen it in action: the way a mere phrase or phone call or the briefest of moments can permanently alter every cell in your body, so that afterwards you never think or dream or breathe the same way again. I don’t need anyone to tell me that all we have is this moment, this one, right now. I already know.

And yet. As I sit here, writing this to you, I am – at this very moment – procrastinating. I am putting off doing things that are important to me. Even after I resolved that I wouldn’t, I am still finding ways to stall. I am making excuses. Why?

I have a plan. It’s sort of epic. Can I tell you about it?

Ever since my mother died two and a half years ago, a story has been kicking around inside of my brain. Scenes of it play in my mind like a movie. It is a movie. Well, not yet. After mom died, I wrote the story in fits and starts – sketches of scenes, bits of dialogue. But I couldn’t really get a rhythm going because too much was happening. I was too messed up. I couldn’t see it or admit it at the time, but I was. My dad was sick, my grandmother was sick, the person I loved most in the world was abruptly gone with all kinds of questions surrounding her death, and oh, on a side note, my personal life was an utter disaster. My world had flipped upside down.

To make everything worse, I couldn’t write. I felt stupid, clumsy. My tongue was thick in my mouth. Words were stubborn, refusing to string together to form sentences. The thing that had always come easy for me, the thing I’d fallen back on when all else failed, had suddenly become impossible.

But little by little, it started to come back. I started writing again. And over the last two plus years, I have written a lot. I wrote while my life changed. I wrote through all kinds of moments – heartbreaking moments and sweet moments, laugh out loud moments and joyful moments. You see, once you get through the worst part of a trauma, once you realize it won’t actually kill you, once you realize that you still care enough to pick yourself up and keep on living, you become capable of experiencing profound joy. And it’s often joy where you wouldn’t expect it: in small, seemingly insignificant moments that you never even realized were beautiful until you looked at them through the lens of loss. Even though you’re sadder and more broken, when you laugh you really mean it, and when you love you really mean it, and even though you wouldn’t wish what’s happened to you on anyone, your dirty little secret is that you don’t want to go back to the way you were before, because the old you was oblivious, fumbling around in the dark, while this you is awake to everything. And once you’ve woken up, you can’t go back to sleep.

But this is not meant to be a blog about loss, it’s meant to be a blog about procrastinating. See? I’m doing it again. OK, to get back to the point: the story that has been kicking around in my head for the last two and a half years while I tried and failed at writing it is finally taking shape. It’s a screenplay of a movie that is based upon my life.

The story is set in Olympia, Washington, the town where I went to high school and where I plan to film the movie. That’s right, I’m going to make the movie myself. I know just enough about producing films to be terrified of how much work it will be, how much money it will cost, and how much I still need to learn. Basically, I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. Not yet.

But in allowing myself to feel overwhelmed about the filmmaking part before I’m even there yet, I’ve been putting off the step I’m on now, which is sort of crucial: finishing the script. I’m self-aware enough to recognize my own resistance, and resistance and I are currently locked in a daily tug of war. I’ve got post it notes with motivational sayings all over my house, an accountability circle where I bring in pages of the script every week, and plans for a table read of the full script in May. But every day when it’s time for me to sit down and do my work, I’m like a petulant child who doesn’t want to go to school, looking for any excuse I can not to go.

What the hell is my problem? This story is important to me, and I want to tell it. Yes, writing it is hard. Yes, certain scenes aren’t coming out the way I want them to, at least not yet. But I’m making everything so much harder than it needs to be with my acrobatic stalling techniques. If writing this script is the thing that matters most to me, why will I do nearly anything to avoid working on it?

Maybe it’s the fear of failure thing. Maybe it’s the fear of success thing. Maybe it’s the fear that I’ll actually accomplish my goal and after all the blood, sweat and tears, I’ll get to the other side of it and realize that this process didn’t heal my life the way I’m hoping it will. Maybe I’m afraid that no matter what I do, nothing will ever change.

I think to some degree, my resistance is probably rooted in all of these things. But even though I’m scared, I’m also stubborn. I’m going to battle through this, just like I’ve battled through everything else these last couple of years. Because for all the challenges that lie ahead, I refuse to believe that I could have treaded through such deep water simply to give up. Our heroine battles through the worst experiences of her life, stands upon the precipice of utter despair, and then – throws in the towel. Now that would make a lousy movie.

If you’re anything like me – if you’re feeling overwhelmed by a big dream that you badly want to accomplish but don’t know where to start or what to do – this is what I suggest: start small. Break down your big dream into as many small tasks as you can, and just do one thing at a time. Do one small thing every day that keeps you moving forward. Don’t worry about what could go wrong in the future – it either will or it won’t and you’ll deal with it when you get there. Just do what’s in front of you every day.

We moved a lot when I was growing up. In the beginning it was because my dad was in the military; later, just because we were following (or looking for) jobs. From when I was born in a military hospital in Germany until I entered middle school, we moved nearly every year. I was used to putting all my stuff into boxes, then taking it all out of boxes again in a new house, in a new town, with a new school. Each move brought a different bedroom, a different neighborhood, a different teacher, different friends. My family was strong and constant, but the rest of the world swirled and shifted around us.

I was a quiet kid, shy and introverted. It’s not easy always being the new kid. Walking into a classroom full of strange faces and being the only kid that wasn’t there yesterday is tough. Amidst all that change and transition, though, I found a warm and reliable refuge: books. Ah, books.

Every school I attended had a library. Thank God. A room that’s full of shelves that are full of books that are full of stories. Stories that are diverse and unique and extraordinary and varied – but are beautifully the same no matter where you read them. Whether I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in Spokane, or Montana, or Kansas, Narnia was always in the same place. I could go there whenever I wanted, from wherever I was. Stories always know where true north lies in our interior geography.

I remember vividly when my mom presented me with my very first chapter book to read on my own: The Beast in Mrs. Rooney’s Room by Patricia Reilly Giff, part of the Polk Street School series. I was in First Grade, living in Montana, and I threw myself on my bed and devoured it in one sitting. Not long after that, the boxes came out. We were moving again. We’d only been there a year and a half but I had close friends and a school I loved and I did not want to go.

Kids, though, rarely get choices. Away we went. My first day at the new school, I was sad and lonely. No one invited me to sit with them at lunch (in fact, another vivid memory: they scooted awayfrom me when I sat down). And then we went to the library. All those books lined up, waiting. And right there on the shelf were the Polk Street School books. Those same crazy kids having goofy misadventures in Mrs. Rooney’s room. They were right there waiting for me. My spinning compass fell still.

Stillness is underrated. Life is loud, and for a lot of kids the chaos that surrounds them isn’t all that great. Fighting parents, jeering bullies, police sirens, moving boxes, absent fathers. In a rushed and hectic world, books stand still. They, in fact, require stillness. Stories ground you in stillness right where you sit, but at the same time take you safely away to other worlds.

Books are faraway places that we can hold in our hands; they are distant adventures, yet they’re right there in our hearts.

As teachers, as librarians, as parents, we get to share so much with children. Knowledge. Humor. Wisdom, maybe. And we get to share books with them. Stories. Books that may grow to mean a great deal to them. Books that might answer questions they’ve been holding too long in their hearts, or make them ask questions they never have before. Books that may make them feel things that are utterly new and yet achingly familiar. Books that make them think, books that make them feel. Or maybe books that do nothing but make them laugh…and is there absolutely anything wrong with that? Is there really too much kid laughter in the world?

It’s a wonderful gift, being able to share books with kids.

I am so sorry about your dog, Lupe. Here…try this book, Love that Dog. I think you’ll love it.

I know sometimes you feel trapped and alone, Jason. Why don’t you read The One and Only Ivan…I hope it’ll mean as much to you as it does to me.

Michael, you sure seem kind of down today. Know what I think you need? A little Captain Underpants therapy.

A new student arrived at my school this year. She was quiet, she was unsure, she was very far from the home she’d known.

In her first day at the library, I was showing her around a little bit, her uncertain eyes scanning the library shelves. Then her breath caught. She reached up and softly, lovingly touched the spine of a book.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Charlotte’s Web! I read this at my old school. I love it. You have it here, too?”

And then, for the first time since she’d arrived, she smiled.

I knew, exactly and personally, how she felt.

That book was not just a story about a pig and spider. It was a little piece of home – a little piece of home that she will be able to find wherever she goes. If she moves again, and again, and finds herself again and again in a new home and a new town like I did, she’ll always be able to walk into whatever new school she arrives at and find that book on the library shelves. It’ll always be there for her. An old friend. And there’s nothing a new kid needs more than an old friend. That’s the truth.

And now, in addition to being a teacher-librarian, I have the privilege of being a writer. A writer of a book for kids, a book that will actually find a home on library shelves in different schools, in different towns, in different states. And that feels amazing. Because in so many ways, I’m still that new kid, that quiet kid looking for a piece of home on those library shelves. And now, in some places, my book will be there.

And somewhere, maybe, some new kid on their first day at a scary new school might see my book and smile and say, “Hey. I read that book at my old school. They have it here, too.”

And that kid will know what I learned as a kid, and what I bet everyone reading this knows:

Books are not just things. They are worlds that we can always come home to.

Dan Gemeinhart is an elementary teacher-librarian. He lives with his wife and three young daughters in Cashmere, WA. The Honest Truth, his debut middle grade novel, comes out this month from Scholastic Press. You can connect with him on Facebook, on his website (www.dangemeinhart.com), and on Twitter (@dangemeinhart).

Remember when I wrote that I felt like a character in someone else’s coming-of-age story? I was only scratching the surface with that. I’ve been long intrigued by a stock character in popular fiction – the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. For the non-literary of mind, this is a female character that is quirky, bubbly and helps the male protagonist grow from his limited state to a more liberated, mature place. She is immensely likeable and for awhile, it’s easy to confuse her for independent. It’s just that she is such a PERSONALITY, you tend to think of it as a strong one.

*Image via Reluctant Femme

It turns out I’ve been a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in many of my relationships with men in the past 10-odd years. No man who has been around me in this time would accuse me of being boring. Even the most hostile of them will admit that things tend to be exciting, in flux and unpredictable when I’m around. I’ve challenged their beliefs, railed against their ways of being and blurred more boundaries than most people do in their turbulent teen years. The nicer ones among them will admit to being charmed and even changed for the better because of my presence in their lives. The others would probably roll their eyes and thank their stars its over. I don’t tend to get moderate reactions. Who I am draws from and defines who I draw to me. I thought I was breaking a pattern by moving to younger men, these past four years. But it turns out, I’ve stayed true to the pattern. Twenty-something men have had enough experiences to know the worries of the world. They are also not wise enough to have made their peace with them or found ways to address them in a way that doesn’t disrupt other things in their lives (health, family, society etc). That’s the exact target audience for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She intrigues them because she is quirky (and not just pretty in that shiny object way) and unpredictable. Plus she is flawed enough to not intimidate their still fragile sense of masculinity. I suppose the other choice I had among the pop culture/fiction archetype pantheon was the Child-Woman. MPDG seems like a more nuanced character with only a few flecks of the immature, broken child-woman. So it was Manic Pixie Dream Girl then. I still like how colourful and vibrant that title sounds (not to mention verbose). So what’s the problem? I thought I was a boring kid and if there was a way to send a message back to that depressed little girl I was, I’d say,

“Mission accomplished! Boringness slayed. Achievement unlocked!”

*Image via SparkNotes

But I’m not a little girl anymore desperately needing to prove something. And there is something terribly limiting about a stock character, especially a supporting one. Because Manic Pixie Dream Girl, make no mistake, is a supporting character in a man’s story. She is boxed and she has no real story of her own. She exists in a permanent state of desperate chaos, which draws men like flies to her but doesn’t do her many favours in the form of stability or happiness. Men eventually tire of her or grow away from her (Here’s a man who tells his tale using the MPDG lexicon: ‘Uh honey, that’s not your line‘). Even the creator of this title, Nathan Rabin, has tired of her (here’s his apology to the world for coining the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl). It occurred to me over a sandwich today (yes, how random, how MPDG of me) that perhaps the reason I was drawing exclusively younger men these days was not only because they were the only single ones around. Perhaps it was because I was being exactly one kind of girl that twenty-something men found themselves drawn to. There’s nothing wrong with twenty-something men, of course. The MPDG character draws a very specific kind of man and story. The men can think but they’re yet to gain mastery over emotion. They are also at a peculiarly specific kind of self-centered place in their lives, having gotten ahead of themselves and tasting responsibility for the first time. They do not have the ability to deal with a complex human being over a length of time, especially what MPDG would be, if she was a real person (which I am). The story that plays out – inevitably – is the same one. The sudden struck-by-lightening style attraction, the broad gestures and lavish promises, the unimaginably magical conversations, the sudden crashes, the melodramatic outbursts and the inevitable sugar crashes. Been there, so much done that. I so hope I’m over it.

*Image via TheFrisky

Before you go all people-don’t-change on me, let me tell you, yes, they do. We are constantly evolving creatures and this is extremely superficial, social behaviour that I’m talking about. That doesn’t determine me anymore than the colour of the pyjamas I wear to bed. I do have control over the kind of character I project. I can modify this without curbing any of my natural spontaneity. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to express who I am fully, without limiting it to bite-sized quirk pieces that equally limited men can digest. I just have to figure out how to do this, especially considering the men and I are both so used to the familiar storyline, we fall into it by default.

*Image via HVNG

I am not terribly alarmed at discovering that I’ve been unconsciously mirroring a fiction character type. After all, I am woefully short of role models. Besides, I’d rather follow ideas than real people with their limitations and flaws. Ideas can be modified or discarded more easily. Sigh, yes, that’s another very Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing to say. But MPDG is as limiting in real life as it is in fiction. I don’t want to be only seen that way. And I’d like to be seen by more people than the ones that this character was created to make happy. I have very little idea who I am going to be beyond my MPDG persona but identifying the box should be the first way out of it. Besides 2015 is a bare few days away. What better new year resolution than to be a different, new ME? I found several other pieces by women about throwing off Manic Pixie Dream Girldom:

Note: If you are intrigued by how stock characters can mirror our ways of being, go to TV Tropesto find others. If you find yourself relating to one of them, post a comment here telling me which one. It’ll make for a fun conversation!